Technical advice for data recovery, tips for data preservation, and general wisdom from someone who has been recovering data and working on computers and other electronic hardware for decades.
In this case, we received a 16GB PNY SD-HC camera card for photo recovery. The owner was not aware of any damage and thought the device had just stopped working. Unfortunately, there were still about 1,900 hi-res photos on the card that had not been copied yet. To start this case, we removed the plastic […]
This week’s data recovery case of note is a 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001. This model Seagate is notorious for failure so it really didn’t need an extra push over the cliff, but it got one. When we received this customer’s drive it had good padding, but the top cover was not on the HDD, it was […]
SSD data recovery presents some new challenges for data recovery labs. It requires new training, techniques, and tools. One controller type stands out as notorious in the DR world, it’s known as “SandForce”. To this day support has still not been added to the top SSD data recovery tool. For some Sandforce SSD failures there […]
At Blizzard Data Recovery we see a lot of 2.5″ laptop hard drives where the laptop suffered a fall or impact. Tip: don’t get mad at the internet and throw your laptop or bang on the keyboard 🙂 In some cases the laptop fails to boot and it ends up going to a computer repair […]
It’s not uncommon to see a USB flash device (UFD) with a broken connector. In many cases, the the micro traces get torn, so just replacing the connector won’t be enough to repair the device. If you are sure you just need to replace the connector, here are the common pinouts for wiring the USB […]
Recovery cases for Seagate mobile drives (Rosewood Disk Drive Family) have increased considerably in the past 8 months. When these hard drives first came out we saw a number of them that were unrecoverable because the platter surfaces were destroyed. This year the successful recovery ratio has become more in line with other brands and […]
DIY data recovery cases have always trickled in to our lab, but recently there has been an upward trend for opened hard disk drives. Most of the time the data owner has opened the device because a YouTuber told them they could get their data back. Unfortunately, there were no details in the video about […]
In this case we have a conventional Alcor AU6998SN based USB flash drive with a Toshiba monolith (THNU3EN00PL07) re-purposed as the NAND. With our PC-3000 Flash tool and the Spiderboard adapter from Ace Laboratories we can read the data directly from the NAND, bypassing the controller. You never know what you will find when you […]
Toshiba laptop and portable hard drives in general seem to be very reliable. Most Toshiba 2.5″ cases we see are the result of the HDD or laptop being dropped. In this case the problem was quite different. This Toshiba is a hybrid known as a solid state hard drive (SSHD). Basically it is conventional device […]